Stanley Elkin - The Magic Kingdom

“What about it, kids? Think the ka-ka maker here has done doo-doo?”

“Why not?” Lydia Conscience asked levelly. “England expects every man to do his doo-doo.”

“Ohh,” groaned Rena Morgan.

“Pretty good,” Mickey acknowledged. First Sneezy, the speedy little magicianess sprawled out on the bed, then the original wise-guy kid, then Sleepy, then Happy Belly making with the puns. They’re ringers, he thought. They ain’t even sick. They’re just these healthy all-pro ringers. Them little dwarfs is show-biz giants. I’m a goner, I’m done for. The Fated Follies. I love it. Yeah yeah yeah.

The heart gone out of him now. Not in the mood any longer to take up the challenge. Unresponsive, depleted. (Or not even someone who could look through walls, see all sides. Maybe just someone who could see straight. Maybe just anyone who wasn’t depleted, who still had some of his wits about him. Though in the long run it probably wouldn’t have mattered. Or even in the short one. Just enough run for all of them to get out with their honor intact, cover their ass, make it home free, not have to apologize for anything, not go buy trouble.) Figuring he’d lost out, blown this gig too, his big break, his chance of a lifetime, his opportunity to play what he now understood would probably have been a series of command performances, limited engagements to kids who were themselves limitedly engaged, showing his stuff, special death material — and didn’t he have to hand it to the market research boys, though? they didn’t miss a trick — as if the dying-children trade were only another sort of convention, another sort of industrial show, using his falsetto still, but as protective coloration pure and simple, as once, he remembered, he’d refused to come out of its rear end when he and a partner had played a rag horse in a class play. Some career, thought the depleted actor. Horses, dogs, mice.

Because the commotion, the uproar, was not only still going on but gathering momentum.

Noah Cloth, hurt and frightened by the Mouse’s dark prophesies, had begun to cry. “Unbearable,” he sobbed. “Unkind. Uncomfortable. Unendurable. Unpleasant. How true, how true.”

“Get Cloth’s buddy,” Lydia Conscience said. “Who’s his buddy? The kid’s throwing a tantrum. Get his buddy over here. Janet?”

“I’ve nothing to do with it. I’m Tony’s buddy,” Janet Order said.

“Well, I’m not his buddy. I’m Benny’s buddy,” Lydia said.

“I’m telling,” Tony Word said darkly.

“Well, who is his damn buddy? He’s falling apart. He’ll wake the whole hotel.”

“Maybe Mudd-Gaddis.”

“Mudd-Gaddis wasn’t assigned a buddy. You think they’d assign Mudd-Gaddis a buddy? My God, he practically doesn’t even come with a shadow practically.”

“I’m telling.”

“Maybe Tony’s his buddy,” Benny suggested.

“How can Tony be his buddy?” Janet asked. “What’s wrong with you, don’t you listen? I already said Tony’s my buddy.”

“Who are you, saying, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Who? Just who in hell are you, saying, ‘Don’t you listen?’”

“Big man!”

“I never had any complaints.”

“Big man!”

“I am, I’m telling.”

Noah was howling now.

“You bet, big man!”

Practically screaming.

“What, what are you telling?” Lydia shouted.

“That’s what’s wrong with our system,” Mudd-Gaddis observed to Pluto. “We can’t always remember who our buddies are when we need them.”

“Does this have something to do with my religion?”

“What does your religion have to do with anything, Christ- killer?”

“This is what you think they want,” Mickey said, appealing to the Dog, “din and squabble?”

“Rena Morgan!” Mudd-Gaddis said suddenly.

“Rena Morgan what?”

“Rena Morgan is Noah’s buddy.”

Lydia Conscience was all over Noah Cloth like a mother hen. Janet joined her, cajoling, consoling, the two girls’ attentions vaguely suggestive.

“I’m telling that no one can help,” Tony Word said, and burst into tears.

“Well, yeah, I see it,” the Mouse said. “Really. I do. It has this certain — how shall one put it? — this certain…oh, Grand Guignol charm.”

They led Noah to the bed and laid him down gently.

“There you go,” Lydia said. “That’s right. Right beside Rena. He’s a little upset, Reenie,” she said. “See if you can quiet him down. Are you going to be all right, Noah? Are you going to stop getting on everyone’s N-E-R-V-E-S?”

“As a concept it’s brilliant,” Mickey Mouse said. “Right up there with, oh, say, signing Shakespeare for the deaf.”

“You mustn’t mind what Janet says,” Lydia Conscience whispered to her buddy, Benny. “She’s a bitch and a ball- breaker.” And turned to the blue girl. “In case you haven’t noticed,” she said, “Tony’s acting up.”

“Take care of it yourself,” she said. “Can’t you see I’ve my hands full?”

Mickey Mouse could. On the bed Sneezy was flailing about, her windmill hands going like crazy, missing the probable Dopey lying next to her, who’d covered his ears but didn’t seem inclined to roll out of her way. Together they managed to give the impression of a helpless, ignorant piglet and a vicious sow inside a farrowing house. Blue Grumpy had all she could do to try to guide the dangerous Sneezer’s flying hands back down to her sides.

It’s part of the show, was the Mouse’s professional opinion. He looked over at the talent scout in his Pluto suit to gauge his reaction. The Dog seemed worried behind his one-size-fits-all permanent stare. Clearly such niceties were either over his head or he was building the tip with his phony rim-shot concern. Probably the former and, if anyone cared to ask him, it would be over the heads, too, of most of her potential audiences. If they noticed anything going on at all, chances were it would just be a jumble of meaningless tics to them. Would they understand, or even see, for that matter, that she was shifting rolled handkerchiefs from one place on her person to another? If they did, would they notice that she sacrificed the advantage of leverage and not only worked them close up but lying down? Would they appreciate the Grumpess’s subtle contribution or at all take in that by laying hands on her, or attempting to, the result was the equivalent of working blindfold without a net, defying all ringmaster convention and actually inviting impedance rather than appealing for silence before a particularly difficult turn? Dulled, dying kids? It had to be lost on them. God, she was good. He had to admit it, suddenly as generous as one stand-up comic scrutinizing the performance of another. If it was lost it was lost. The children in her audiences had about twelve minutes to live. They deserved the best.

Then he saw that something had changed. She’d run out of props, the long furl of handkerchiefs she’d managed to conceal — so that what she did passed beyond the realm of entertainment and entered art — hiding this one here, that one there, all the while making discreet, even delicate, passes at her nose— because she actually used them, the Mouse saw — had all been filled and returned to their hiding places, all the while continuing to maintain by misdirection and the feints of her grand and flighty fidget the complicated illusion that nothing was there. (Which by now, of course, nothing was.) What she did took the trained actor’s breath away, and he looked again in the direction of the faggot Dog. Who seemed, talent scout or no, more than a little bored. Mickey Mouse shook his head in disgust at even this appearance of indifference and turned back to the girl on the bed. Who had gone into her labored breathing, the hacksaw rasps of her sawn and strangled weather. It was, essentially, the same big, terrifying finish she’d used on him in the elevator.